Make an existing Git branch track a remote branch?

Another option is not to use the command line at all. Git GUI clients such as SourceTree take away much of the syntactical learning curve that causes questions such as this one to be amongst the most viewed on StackOverflow.

In SourceTree, simply right click on the local branch, select "Track remote branch >" and pick from the list.

You might find the git_remote_branch tool useful. It offers simple commands for creating, publishing, deleting, tracking & renaming remote branches. One nice feature is that you can ask a grb command to explain what git commands it would execute.

grb explain create my_branch github
# git_remote_branch version 0.3.0

# List of operations to do to create a new remote branch and track it locally:
git push github master:refs/heads/my_branch
git fetch github
git branch --track my_branch github/my_branch
git checkout my_branch

I believe that in as early as Git 1.5.x you could make a local branch $BRANCH track a remote branch origin/$BRANCH, like this.

Given that $BRANCH and origin/$BRANCH exist, and you've not currently checked out $BRANCH (switch away if you have), do:

git branch -f --track $BRANCH origin/$BRANCH

This recreates $BRANCH as a tracking branch. The -f forces the creation despite $BRANCH existing already. --track is optional if the usual defaults are in place (that is, the git-config parameter branch.autosetupmerge is true).

Note, if origin/$BRANCH doesn't exist yet, you can create it by pushing your local $BRANCH into the remote repository with:

git push origin $BRANCH

Followed by the previous command to promote the local branch into a tracking branch.

Actually for the accepted answer to work:

git remote add upstream <remote-url>
git fetch upstream
git branch -f --track qa upstream/qa
# OR:
git branch --set-upstream qa upstream/qa

In very short

git branch --set-upstream yourLocalBranchName origin/develop

This will make your yourLocalBranchName track the remote branch called develop.

For 1.6.x, it can be done using the git_remote_branch tool:

grb track foo upstream

That will cause Git to make foo track upstream/foo.

You can do the following (assuming you are checked out on master and want to push to a remote branch master):

Set up the 'remote' if you don't have it already

# git remote add origin ssh://...

Now configure master to know to track:

# git config branch.master.remote origin
# git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master

And push:

# git push origin master

I do this as a side-effect of pushing with the -u option as in

$ git push -u origin branch-name

The equivalent long option is --set-upstream.

The git-branch command also understands --set-upstream, but its use can be confusing. Version 1.8.0 modifies the interface.

git branch --set-upstream is deprecated and may be removed in a relatively distant future. git branch [-u|--set-upstream-to] has been introduced with a saner order of arguments.

…

It was tempting to say git branch --set-upstream origin/master, but that tells Git to arrange the local branch "origin/master" to integrate with the currently checked out branch, which is highly unlikely what the user meant. The option is deprecated; use the new --set-upstream-to (with a short-and-sweet -u) option instead.

Say you have a local foo branch and want it to treat the branch by the same name as its upstream. Make this happen with

$ git branch foo
$ git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/foo

or just

$ git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/foo foo

Make sure you run :

git config push.default tracking

to be able to push trouble free

Editing .git/config is probably the easiest and fastest way. That's what the Git commands for handling remote branches are doing, anyway.

If you don't want to muck with the file by hand (and it's not that hard to do), you can always use git config to do it...but again, that's just going to edit the .git/config file, anyway.

There are, of course, ways to automatically track a remote branch when using git checkout (by passing the --track flag, for example), but these commands work with new branches, not existing ones.